Levies have been breached by severe flooding from intensified storms linked to climate change [Erika Blumenfeld/AJE]

San Salvador - "We have a very clear position," El
Salvador's Minister of Environment, Herman Chavez, told Al Jazeera at
his office in San Salvador, the capital.

"The President of El Salvador, last year on July 20th, in an
extraordinary meeting of presidents that was convened here in San
Salvador, launched the intervention process. We put Climate Change as
the number one issue for the region."

The government of El Salvador's position, which mirrors that of other
Central American countries like Nicaragua, Guatemala, and Honduras, is
due to the fact that anthropogenic (human caused) climate change is
impacting the planet more than ever, and scientists expect it to worsen.

In January, new figures provided by NASA and the National Oceanic and
Atmospheric Administration confirmed that Earth's global average
surface temperature for 2010 tied 2005 for the hottest year on record.
The two agencies' figures also showed that 2010 was the wettest year
ever recorded.

Wild weather

2010 proved to be a model year for what the planet can expect as the
result of climate change. Huge floods occurred in Pakistan, Australia,
and California. A record-breaking heat wave in Russia, and the severe
die-offs of coral reefs underscored the acceleration of the global
trends in Climate Change.

Last year was also the 34th consecutive year that global temperatures
have been above the 20th-century average, and nine of the 10 warmest
years on record have occurred since 2001 due to what scientists
attribute to a 40 per cent increase in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere
since the Industrial Revolution began.

"Climate change for us is not a hypothesis," Minister Chavez added.
"It is a very concrete reality that strikes us. The disasters we've been
having are very clearly linked to climate change."

El Salvador, like other countries in the region, has been
dramatically affected by severe weather events including extreme rain
events and flooding from tropical storms and hurricanes that are
increasing in both frequency and intensity.

New research

On February 16 two new studies published in the journal Nature confirmed the link between climate change and more extreme precipitation events.

Based on measurements taken from over 6,000 weather stations, results
revealed that human-induced heating of the planet has already made
rainfall more intense, which has led to more severe floods.

The studies suggest that the planet's climatic system may well be
more sensitive to small temperature increases than was previously
believed.

"Warmer air contains more moisture and leads to more extreme
precipitation," Francis Zwiers of the University of Victoria, one of the
researchers, reported.

The studies show that extreme precipitation and flooding over the
entire northern hemisphere has increased by seven percent between 1951
and 1999 as a result of anthropogenic global warming. That represents an
increase more than twice the increase projected by climate modeling. (Dahr Jamail's article is continued HERE)

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